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Women's football faces an existential threat from COVID-19. Using case studies, the authors explore the COVID-19 responses of three highly ranked national football associations (Australia, England and the USA) and their professional women's football leagues to (a) compare and shed new insights into the wide range of phased responses and (b) establish recommendations for other nations to navigate major crises with their social and ethical responsibilities to women's football.

Drawing on institutional theory, a framework analysis was undertaken examining 71 articles to analyse the gendered global impacts of COVID-19 on women's football.

Results highlight several important recommendations for nations to consider during the pandemic: (1) maintain active communication with the community to allay worries about the future of women's football, (2) gather support from health and government officials, (3) seek out commercial and broadcasting partnerships to drive revenue, and (4) the interests of women's football are best served when responsibility for the elite women's league does not rest (solely) with national football associations.

The authors argue that sport is an interwoven part of society and cannot be separated from gender equality issues irrespective of the pandemic.

The study is first to explore institutional pressures and football governing bodies during COVID-19 and provides a framework for nations to manage major crises.

This chapter examines English print media coverage of the England national women's football (soccer) team during the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup. It draws on a content analysis of five English national newspapers from 24 May to 14 August 2015. A wide body of research has demonstrated that women's sport continues to be greatly underrepresented in the media but our findings are important as they demonstrate that during this tournament, women's football received a significant amount of print media coverage and that this coverage was largely positive. We argue that we have entered a new age of media coverage of women's sport in the United Kingdom, with a shift towards greater gender equality, and position this within the context of emerging professionalisation in the sport.

This chapter introduces women's football in a global, professional era. Key in this is an acknowledgement of the male-dominated roots of the sport in many contexts, which has historically served to restrict women's participation. However, we identify the significant growth of women's involvement in football, which has resulted in professional opportunities for women playing and working in the sport. Football organisations are increasingly taking the development of the women's game more seriously and football can be considered a legitimate career opportunity for women. The chapter then identifies the scope of the book, which includes contributions on the lived experience of professionalisation, the processes of professionalisation and the role of commercialisation and media.

Women’s football has received increasing attention in the academic literature, partly due to its growing popularity worldwide. However, women’s football research remains scattered across numerous academic domains. Focusing on the social sciences, humanities and management disciplines, the purpose of this paper is to map and organise contributions, and to identify research directions for future studies within these disciplines.

Using the keywords “women”, “girls”, “female” and “football” or “soccer” to initially identify articles, an integrative approach was followed to evaluate and analyse relevant literature. In all, 117 academic journals were classified and subsequently divided into 26 themes according to the subject area, topic and level examined.

Results of this integrative review show an increasing trend of journal publications since 1998, with a large representation of studies related to historical and sociological research, where qualitative methods are dominant. Articles investigating economic, managerial and marketing areas appeared in more recent times. Women’s football has been researched from different perspectives (players, fans, sport organisations) and across various countries.

The restricted scope of this review (i.e. its focus on social sciences) and the manual classification of articles represent two limitations of this study. However, the synthesis of academic literature provided may assist scholars who are interested in women’s football and women’s sports research to fill identified research gaps and contribute to further advance academic investigations in this area.

This paper provides an overview of salient research avenues and represents the first attempt to critically appraise the direction of academic contributions in women’s football for the purpose of advancing scholarly inquiry in this sport.

The colors of change is an overview of change paradigms, created about two decades ago, that has been intensively used, tested, refined, shared, and elaborated by practitioners and academics alike. Here, the “color theory” is presented as it is now, and is situated within the literature. Its four main applications are described as well as rules of thumb that have been derived from reflective practice. This chapter illustrates that the color theory is clearly not one thing to all people, as it is understood in very different ways, both in terms of its theoretical foundations as well as the complexity of its applications. This probably adds to the versatility of the theory. Bringing together key insights about the color theory for academics and practitioners, this chapter strives both to give a concise overview and to explore its richness.

This research aims to introduce an anxious product-shaking effect, whereby consumers regulate the emotion of anxiety (i.e. anxious, nervous and jittery) elicited through product packaging design by shaking a product, which decreases eating intentions and behavior. Shaking product interaction as a result of anxiety-inducing product packaging design is introduced as a strategy to counter emotional eating, as an effective preventive measure of obesity.

Three laboratory studies (Studies 1–3) and one online study (Study 4) are conducted. Study 1 examines the effect of anxiety-inducing product packaging design on product interaction (i.e. shaking vs pouring). Study 2 investigates whether product shaking is a form of emotional regulation to anxiety-inducing product packaging design. Study 3 explores the effect of emotional regulation suppression (i.e. pouring) and facilitation (i.e. shaking) on eating behavior. Study 4 examines the moderating role of phobia severity on the effect of anxiety-inducing product packaging on emotional regulation and the downstream consequences on eating intentions.

Results demonstrate that the presence of anxiety-eliciting product packaging design results in shaking of the product (Study 1) as a form of emotional regulation (Study 2). Results from Study 3 find that emotional regulation facilitation (i.e. shaking) decreases eating, while emotion regulation suppression (i.e. pouring) increases eating. Results of Study 4 show that when exposed to anxiety-inducing product packing design, those with low phobia severity are less likely to regulate their emotions, which subsequently increases their eating intentions.

This research is limited as it focuses only on product interaction and consumption of food products.

This research has important implications for marketers and product managers, as well as public policymakers, in encouraging responsible consumption behaviors in consumers. Marketing, product managers and policymakers should consider packaging design to introduce anxiety-inducing imagery on the packaging itself as a way to encourage shaking emotional regulation and to reduce eating, especially of unhealthy foods such as confectionary.

This research introduces and provides evidence of an anxious product-shaking effect that can reduce consumption of unhealthy food products. Anxiety-inducing packaging design strategy results in the emotional regulation of product shaking, which can reduce eating intentions and behavior.

Gaining access to the research field has received much academic attention; however, the literature focusing on the changing and/or multiple roles that researchers adopt during fieldwork has at times been oversimplified. The purpose of this paper is to outline the multiple stages of the fieldwork journey, a more reflexive approach to fieldwork and the research process can be attained.

Data were generated from a four-year ethnographic study of the match-day experiences of the fans of Everton Football Club. In total, over 100 hours were spent doing fieldwork observations with an additional 25 semi-structured interviews forming the data set.

This paper argues that researchers should be more critical of their position in the field of their research, and should seek to identify this more clearly in their scholarship. This in turn would enable for more discussions of how each stage of the fieldwork journey affected the scope and overall findings of the research.

This paper provides an alternative framework for ethnographic researchers to better recognise and acknowledge reflexivity throughout the research process. This is done by outlining the various stages of fieldwork engagement more clearly to better understand how researchers change and adapt to the research environment.

This chapter introduces and sets the scene for a discussion on women's sport in a professional era. Initiated in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement in America in the 1950s with the professionalisation of golf and tennis, the move for other women's sports to be professionalised has been slow, sporadic and marred with difficulties. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been significant changes in the landscape of elite women's sport. Alongside an overview of the developments in elite level women's sport, we conceptualise the terms ‘professionalisation’, ‘professional’ and ‘professionalism’. Furthermore, the chapter identifies the scope of the book, drawing upon the importance to consider women's sport as distinct from men's sport and identifying issues that are specific to female athletes, such as maternity and the gender pay gap. We also recognise the diverse and multiple nature of women's identities, highlighting the intersectionality of female athletes in professional sport (specifically around race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and national identity).

This chapter describes how the technologies of big data might apply to rural contexts. It considers the relative advantages and disadvantages of such ‘new’ innovations.

It uses two case studies, one of online community specialist groups linked to rural activities and a second from a policy shift relating to firearm legislation in the English context.

The chapter suggests that digital data in the forms discussed here can be both benign and underutilised in its potential. In relation to the management of datasets holding information on firearm owners, these need careful reflection regarding their establishment, access and general use.

The chapter provides insight into the rural context and makes a case that such locales are not immune from the influence of the dataverse. The appearance of ‘big data’ here is not without political implications. The case of UK firearm legislation reform demonstrates the implications of policy falling short of its potential and how a social science analysis can unpack the operation of power as well as position the debate more broadly.